The Leopold Story in a Different Light

I said last week that I was inclined to blame Jason Leopold for credulity for his Rove indictment story, rather than dishonesty, because it would be such a dumb think to lie about.  Having read this WaPo article by Joe Lauria, wherein he suggests Leopold may have impersonated him when speaking with Rove spokesman Mark Corallohowever, I am less inclined to be charitable:

"Joe, I would never, ever have done something like that," Leopold said defiantly.

Except that he has done things like that. His memoir is full of examples. He did break big stories, but he lied to get many of them. He admits lying to the lawyers for Enron executives Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow, making up stories to get them to spill more beans. "I was hoping to get both sides so paranoid that one was going to implicate the other," he wrote.

…We may never know what really happened. Most mainstream news organizations have dismissed the Leopold story as egregiously wrong. But even if he had gotten it right and scooped the world on a major story, his methods would still raise a huge question: What value does journalism have if it exposes unethical behavior unethically? Leopold seems to assume, as does much of the public, that all journalists practice deception to land a story. But that's not true. I know dozens of reporters, but Leopold is only the second one I've known (the first did it privately) to admit to doing something illegal or unethical on the job.

I’ll point out here that just because journalists don’t admit to Lauria that they practice deception does not mean they don’t.  They could be doing it without admitting to it.  In any case, it seems to me there’s an even bigger question than the one Lauria asks, which is less philosophical and more pragmatic:  If you lie to land stories, why should the public trust you when you report stories?

Comments

[Russell Lutz]

I've gotta say, I'm not that worked up about a reporter lying to get a story. Cops can lie to get a suspect to confess. Does that make cops untrustworthy?

If a reporter is lying in the story itself, then that forces me to ask, why would he bother to lie to get the information in the first place? The test should not be how the reporter got the info. It should be whether the info is true.